


A Tale Untold

by likethenight



Category: A Knight's Tale (2001)
Genre: Archival Nerdery, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Families of Choice, Fluff, Found Family, Gen, Medieval History, Post-Canon, Yuletide, Yuletide 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:21:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27959855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethenight/pseuds/likethenight
Summary: After the events of the film, the Black Prince gives William and Jocelyn a little manor in the country, and the gang settle down to live happily ever after.
Relationships: Christiana/Roland (A Knight's Tale), Jocelyn/William Thatcher
Comments: 12
Kudos: 22
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	A Tale Untold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thecarlysutra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecarlysutra/gifts).



> Dear recipient, I hope this fits the bill! I send you festive greetings, and hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Please excuse the archival nerdery at the beginning - I am an archivist by profession, and I couldn't resist the temptation to throw a bit of medieval documentation in there! My Latin is a tiny bit wobbly, but this should be a fairly accurate representation of a deed of grant appropriate to the time; the bits about the workings of a medieval manor are also more or less authentic. (Well, I did tag for archival nerdery, and I really really meant it!)
> 
> Big thank you to the indispensable [nerakrose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerakrose) for looking this over for me!

**Extract from the catalogue of the archive of the Thatcher family of Huntingfield**  
**Reference:** D4/T/1  
**Description:** Grant of the manor of Huntingfield, Gloucestershire, from Edward the Black Prince to Sir William Thatcher, knight, and Jocelyn his wife, 28 December 1356:

**Transcription:**  
_Sciant presentes et futuri quod ego Edwardus princeps Walliae alias princeps nigrum dedi concessi et hac presenti carta mea confirmavi Willielmi Thatcher milites et Jocelyn uxori suo et heredibus suis vel suis assignatie manerium de Huntingfield in comiti Gloucestri habendum et tenendum dictum manerium cum omnibus suis pertinentiis dicto William et Jocelyn heredibus et assignatis suis imperpetuum. In cuius rei testimonium presenti carte sigillum meum apposui. Hiis testibus Johanne come Richmondi Thoma come Warwick Roberti come Suffolk Galfride Chaucer et multis aliis. Datum apud Westmonasterium die Mercurii post Nativitas anno regni Regis Edwardi tertii post conquestum_

**Translation:**  
_Know all those present and future that I, Edward Prince of Wales, known as the Black Prince, have given, granted, and by this my present charter confirmed to Sir William Thatcher, knight, and Jocelyn his wife, and their heirs or assigns, the manor of Huntingfield in the county of Gloucester, to have and to hold the said manor with all its appurtenances to the said William and Jocelyn and their heirs or assigns for ever, in witness whereof I have set my seal to this present charter. These being witnesses: John, Earl of Richmond, Thomas, Earl of Warwick, Robert, Earl of Suffolk, Geoffrey Chaucer, and many others. Dated at Westminster the Wednesday after Christmas in the thirtieth year of the reign of King Edward the third since the conquest._  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
It was a wedding present to them, the Prince had said, in the great hall at Westminster as they celebrated their marriage with a feast two days before Christmas. A manor, a little estate all of their very own, with a village and farms and a house with stalls for the pigs and the cows, a hall with a fireplace, a kitchen, rooms above the hall for sleeping, and everything in its place so that John could get about the house easily. For the first year at least William hadn’t had the first idea what to do with it all. He had protested to the Prince that he could not ever repay such generosity, and the Prince had only smiled and said that it was for him to repay William, for treating him with honour and respect in Rouen and Lagny-sur-Marne; now the debt between them was settled. William had felt that simply rescuing him from the stocks had been payment enough, let alone knighting him, let _alone_ giving him a home and an estate, but he did not feel he could argue any further. 

Jocelyn, of course, had taken charge, and William had trailed along in her wake, thanking God’s good grace that he had managed to win the heart of a woman as capable and sensible as she was good and beautiful. They had toured the estate almost as soon as they had arrived, meeting the villagers, getting to know their names, and those of their children, learning what they all did. There was no blacksmith, so the first order of business was to persuade Kate away from the tournament circuit, and no cook, so the second task on the list was to talk Wat into taking on the job. The manor steward was elderly and looking for a successor, so Roland became his apprentice, and John, his hearing and skills at listening enhanced by his blindness, became Roland’s second, always alert for the nuance in people’s voices. Jocelyn stepped seamlessly into the role of lady of the manor, and William - well, William followed along, watched what everyone was doing, and tried his best to learn what was expected of him as lord of the manor. 

It got easier, over time. William would sit in the lord’s chair at the manor court held every three weeks, and he would listen as the villagers brought their complaints and conducted their business. Robert the old steward guided him and Roland and John - and Jocelyn too, when she wasn’t too busy - as to what he should say, what the appropriate fine was for a villager who had allowed his cow to graze on the waste ground at the side of the road, how much a widow should pay to continue in occupation of her late husband’s house, and so on and so forth. There wasn’t much variation to life in the village, but it was more than William had ever had before, and he treasured it. Every day he or Jocelyn would take his father on a walk along the lanes, weather permitting, to meet whoever they might run across, talk about the crops or the livestock or the rain or the sunshine; they would describe everything they saw to John and he would listen hard to the voices, the birdsong, the sounds of the countryside. Many times it was John who came up with the solution to some apparently insoluble problem, who mediated in disputes and made sure nobody walked away until they were all friends again. 

Geoff sent books, on occasion, with humorous little notes about building up Huntingfield’s library. They were all his own, of course, for he seemed to see no point in introducing his friends to the work of other authors, but Jocelyn and Christiana had rather more developed tastes, and they ensured that the works of Chaucer were not too over-represented in their little library.

Every summer William would be off for tournament season, taking Kate with him as his armourer - she grumbled a lot about the general smithing that was her lot in the village, saying she was an armourer and swordsmith, not a farrier or a wheelwright, but she had had to earn her keep making whatever she was asked for before, and William thought that secretly she rather enjoyed it. She soon took on a couple of girls from the village as apprentices, much to their fathers’ dismay, and within a year or two Joan and Maud were more or less capable of running the forge during the summer while Kate was away.

Sometimes Wat or Roland would go too, if the kitchens and the court could be left in the hands of others, but often enough they stayed behind. In the third year after Jocelyn and William came to Huntingfield, after a great deal of shy, hushed, awkward courtship, Roland and Christiana were married in the little church alongside the manor house, and for a year or two after that they were not to be persuaded from their home for the excitement of the joust. Wat, meanwhile, declared himself sworn off love for life. The Duke of York’s cook had been enough for him, he said, what with how hard she had broken his heart, and he was content in his kitchen, cooking all the food for the household and making increasingly ambitious experiments in the field of cakes and desserts. He had, he said, learned a few things other than heartbreak from his lost love, not least a talent for sweetmeats as well as an appreciation for them, and it was not uncommon for him to be far too busy developing new confections to wish to venture abroad with William. 

Jocelyn often went with William, for at least a few of the fixtures in France and most of the English ones, but some years she stayed at home, for along with their home and their friends, God also saw fit to bless the two of them with children, two girls and a boy, Rosamund, Isabel and Edward. The children played with the village children, and with Roland and Christiana’s two boys, William and Roger. Often as not Wat was the one keeping an eye on them; he had turned out to have a fondness for the little ones, as though he had gained a whole brood of little brothers and sisters. He kept them in line with the threat of a good fonging, but mostly he didn’t need to; they adored him and his willingness to play the fool for them, and most of the time they behaved themselves. 

And the years turned and the children grew, the crops ripened and were harvested and were sown again. William swept the board at the tournaments, season after season, and now he had the welfare of his villagers to motivate him, not just that of Wat and Roland and Kate. He would never be one of those despotic lords, demanding more and more money from his tenants, he was determined of it. It was his job to bring the money in, for as long as he could, so that his little estate could thrive. He had changed his stars, taken his nobility at the point of a lance, and it was his duty to pass on his good fortune. 

Every summer, when the tournament came to London, William and Jocelyn would make sure that everyone who wanted could go to see the spectacle. Thomas the carter would harness up all the horses in the villages to all of his carts, and off they would go along the bumpy roads from their quiet little village, staying in tents along the way and having a high old time cheering for William in the stadium, the homegrown hero carrying all before him. 

Count Adhemar no longer took part in the jousts; his excuse was that he was busy with his armies in France, but the Huntingfield contingent knew the real story. He could not possibly show his face in the arena again after how comprehensively William had defeated him in London - and that despite Adhemar’s thoroughly unchivalrous cheating. Nobody missed him, least of all William.

All in all, William’s life was more than he could ever have dreamed of, back when he first put on Sir Ector’s armour and chanced his arm at winning enough money to keep himself and Wat and Roland afloat. He had an estate, a title, a family that comprised more than his own blood. And Jocelyn. William knew he was blessed a thousand times over, far more than he deserved, that he had managed to find her name and win her heart. They did not have to sleep with the pigs, in the home they had been given, but he had no doubt that she would have followed him that far if it had been necessary, and he did not truly understand quite what it was he had done to inspire such faith, such belief; but he would have followed her to the ends of the earth without a single question, if she had asked him to, so perhaps it was simply that the feeling was mutual. 

Sometimes William thought that God truly had stopped the moon, for Jocelyn was still no less beautiful than she had been the day he had met her; in fact, he thought, she was more beautiful, more lovely, more astute, more determined. And he loved her more every day, for all that she was; she had helped him navigate this strange new world of nobility, and it was no secret that it was the lady of the manor who was the one who knew what she was doing. She had tutored him in all that he needed to know, she had stuck by him through thick and thin, and he adored her for it. There was no silence in their house, it rang with voices all the time, and Jocelyn’s was chief among them; and William thought he could not have been happier. They were still learning to know each other, happy to take the lifetime Jocelyn had proclaimed it would take to know what William was. And it was as wonderful as it had been in the earliest days of their courtship. Christiana told the children stories in which everyone lived happily ever after, and William had a strong suspicion that a similar tale could be told about them, in their little village, with all their friends and family around them.

None of it was written down on the small piece of parchment that recorded the Black Prince’s gift to them of the manor of Huntingfield, but William wondered whether maybe, one day, he might persuade Geoff to set some of it down in writing, so that in future people might know how a poor boy from Cheapside had achieved his dreams and changed his stars.


End file.
